Half Life by Jillian Cantor (easy to read books for adults list txt) 📕

bed somewhere in Warsaw, dying. His prestigious job as the dean of Jagiellonian in Krakow. None of that belongs to me, but it could have.

What if I had not stepped on that train, but instead, stayed behind in Poland with him so many years ago? If I had married him, become a mother to his children, and given up on my own education altogether, I would not have my work now.

But then Pierre and I never would have met at the Kowalskis that night so long ago. We never would’ve shared a lab, fallen in love, gotten married. We never would’ve won a Nobel Prize. And Pierre never would have been walking in the rain on his way back from a science academy luncheon on April 19th.

What if I hadn’t stepped on that train, but had turned around, chosen Kazimierz instead?

Then, right now, Pierre would still be in Paris somewhere, very much alive.

Marya

Poland, 1907

I quickly forgot about my wayward fantasy of staying in Paris, as Pierre had suggested that lazy afternoon in the park. Because two momentous things happened to us in Poland in the beginning of 1907.

The first was that mine and Agata’s school grew large enough so that we suddenly needed not just one room to hold classes, but three. And we had enough tuition money, enough regular students now, that we rented what had once been a girls’ gymnasium on Aleja Wróbli. We liked it both for its size and the symbolic nature of the street name. Our Flying University was now housed out in the open, on an avenue named for sparrows.

We hung a large sign out front, designed by our art students, that proclaimed us to be the Women’s University of Loksow. No longer hiding, no longer flying. In addition to my administrative duties that I carried out during the day with Agata, I also taught three courses, three nights a week: beginning chemistry and physics, and a new course this term, advanced physics, as we now had girls who’d been with us long enough to want more advanced knowledge.

The second thing that happened was Kaz finally finished writing up his and Hipolit’s research. His paper was accepted for publication by the Polish Academy of Mathematics in March: The Theory of Elasticity. It was a very momentous and exciting moment in the mathematics field. As Hipolit was no longer alive, all the acclaim and accolades for the work fell squarely on Kazimierz. He received encouraging letters from as far away as America! And in May he was offered a guest lecture position at the University of Vienna to begin in the fall. It was a well-paying appointment, five times what Kaz would be paid in a year to teach at the boys’ school here. As it would only be a one-year appointment, we decided it made the most sense for Klara and me to stay behind in Loksow, without him.

“For now,” Kaz said, with a hopeful note to his voice, like he thought his appointment could be extended, and that I would be more than happy to join him. But what would I want from Austria? Poland was my home. Poland had always been my home. Now that my school was out in the open and thriving, I would not want to leave it.

“Maybe if this goes well,” I told him. “You will get a good job back here?”

“Maybe, kochanie.” He kissed the top of my head. “Finally the entire world might be opened to us. Just the way we always dreamed.”

I thought about the sign we had recently erected on Aleja Wróbli, and it was not the world I wanted any longer. It was Poland, it was my own country. My own burgeoning part of it.

WE PLANNED TO GO TO ZAKOPANE FOR THE WHOLE MONTH OF July to stay with Bronia and Kazimierz, Lou and Jakub, and to spend some family time all together before Kaz left for Austria. Agata and I put our school on summer break, just like the male universities, and I was so excited for this trip. My hands shook with glee as I packed for the three of us. It was the first vacation we had ever taken together, the first vacation Kaz and I had taken since that disastrous one with his family nearly ten years earlier.

Pani Zorawska was reportedly back in Warsaw these days and had taken ill. Kaz received monthly letters from his brother Stan, but he had not gone to seen his mother, not since that time many years earlier when she had offered to pay me to leave him. I still sometimes thought about that, even now. If I had taken her up on her offer, my life might have been completely different. But by the summer of 1907, I no longer desired a different life. The years had softened the blow of Kaz’s betrayal, and since I had Klara, I could not imagine any sort of life that would be good for me, without her.

ON THE TRAIN RIDE TO ZAKOPANE, KAZ SEEMED MORE RELAXED than I had seen him in so long, the features of his face softened. He had grown a beard in these last years, and it had gone half gray in the time he’d been working on compiling his research. There were wrinkles around his eyes that I couldn’t remember being there, even last year at this time, around when I returned from Paris. And I put my hand to my own face, wondering if age had shown up the same way on me. If it did, did Kaz notice? Age looked handsome on him though, and sitting there with him, I remembered again how much I’d always desired him.

After a little while on the train, he put his arm around me, and I relaxed, too, and did something I hadn’t in so long: I leaned in to him. I put my head on his shoulder and closed my eyes, enjoying the warmth of his body so close